Last September, some of the Debian Linux distribution's leadership wanted to make sure that Etch, the next version of Debian, arrived on its December 4th due date. Almost two months later, though, according to the February 17th Release Critical Bug Report memo to the Debian Developers Announcement list, there are still 541 release critical bugs.

if this delays keep up it might force a number of debian users that don't have the kind of patience to wait for etch to get release to other distros,

Or they could use etch. Debian Testing is pretty stable. There's a lot of package churn at times, but that can be offset by not running apt-get upgrade every day. I've been using Testing for several years (Sarge then Etch) with no problems.

Granted, no one would want to do that on a server, and it is more work than tracking Stable. For me though it's always provided a nice compromise of stable/cutting edge.